Welcome to the Fryers’ Club

Back in December, I got us a Bayou Classic 4-gallon deep fryer, and we have made a few things in it. It has been a fantastic experience. It’s a tremendous labor-saver compared to a pot on the stove, it fries a lot of food at once, it fries food better than the stove, and it doesn’t grease up the kitchen walls. Also, it’s not feeble and useless like an indoor fryer that plugs into the wall.

The oil lasts forever. I just added new oil after over 6 months. I don’t use the fryer all that often, so I would guess that other home fry cooks need to change their oil more often than I do.

I think it would have lasted a lot longer if I had tried to push it. It was fine the last time I used it.

One reason I decided to change it was that I did not have a proper cover for the fryer. I used a plastic bag and a bungee cord to hold the bag against the fryer. This kept bugs out. The other day I left the bag off overnight, and it made me a little nervous the next day. What if a bunch of roaches had gone for a moonlight swim? I think a bug would float in oil, but I may be wrong. I would hate to drain the oil later, after using it several more times, and see dead roaches shooting out of the hose.

I got a real cover this week, so things are looking up.

I use peanut oil, which is highly regarded. It has a high smoke point, and they say it resists taking on food flavors. It’s not cheap. If I get a good deal, it costs $55 to fill the fryer.

I would like to try beef tallow. I see it selling for $120 for 50 pounds. At that price, I could fill the fryer for about $80. Not out of the question, considering how many meals I could get out of the tallow. Dinner for two at a barbecue joint can easily cost $50 these days, to put it in perspective.

I dreaded cleaning the fryer as I prepared to change the oil. It turned out to be very easy. You put maybe half a gallon of water in the bottom, add a lot of Dawn detergent, and scrub it with a sponge. The crud comes right off. Then you rinse it with the drain hose open. It was no problem at all.

Tonight I used the fryer to make a dish I really love but find intimidating: Cuban pork lumps. The Spanish name is masitas de puerco, which means “little pork lumps.” I believe that’s right. “Masa” is “mass,” so “masita” must be “little mass,” i.e. “lump.”

It’s a very simple dish. You marinate in bitter orange juice (or plain old orange juice soured up with lime or lemon juice), pressure-cook it until it’s tender, and then fry it to make the outside tasty. It comes out tendery and juicy. I like to pile lots of garlic fried in oil on top, along with fried onions and lime juice.

It’s a pain to make on the stove, but a pressure cooker and deep fryer take the suffering out of it.

I used an Instant Pot pressure cooker today, and the food came out great. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

3 pounds pork shoulder chunks with the really thick fat trimmed down
24 ounces orange juice
8 ounces lime or lemon juice
4 cloves garlic, crushed
salt

You want cubes maybe 1.5″ on a side. The size is not critical. Put them in a bowl and salt them down. Brining would probably be even better. It would add juiciness.

Let them sit until the salt goes into the meat. Then pour the citrus juice (also salted) and garlic over them, and let them soak. Half an hour should be fine.

I learned that marinating doesn’t really work, because no matter what you put on meat, salt is the only thing that actually goes in deeper than a couple of millimeters. That’s why I don’t marinate for a long time.

Dump everything in your Instant Pot and set it for 14 minutes. You have to be careful, because meat softens fast in a pressure cooker, so if you’re a couple of minutes over, you could end up with a mushy texture.

Now you fry the meat in a deep fryer until it’s nicely browned.

I made some stuff to go on top of it.

INGREDIENTS
4 large onions
8 ounces olive oil
10 ounces peeled garlic cloves
salt

Slice the onions and fry them until they’re dark. Remove them from the oil and drain them. Puree the garlic in a small processor. Fry it in the oil, but don’t brown it unless you like it that way. If you add some oil to the processor, the pureeing step will be quicker.

Serve the onions and the garlic sauce separately. Apply both very liberally at the table.

That’s all there is to it. It worked. My wife was practically beside herself.

I also fried some ripe plaintains. You just slice them and deep-fry them.

I put lime wedges on the table to squeeze over the pork and plaintains.

This is a marvelous feast, and black beans and rice go great with it. In Miami, they use white rice, but New York Cubans use yellow rice, and it’s very good. You can probably find prepackaged yellow rice near you.

Making your own black bean soup is a huge job. Goya’s version is pretty good, so I used that tonight.

The fryer’s baskets break down and go in the dishwasher, so no problems there.

I still hate Miami more every day than the day before, but my PMSD (figure it out) has abated to the point where I can stand to eat Cuban food. Cubans are great at making delicious peasant food for underpaid workers. There is no such thing as gourmet Cuban food, but if you want a fine dinner made with meat that costs $2.00 per pound, Cuban is a good choice.

RE Cubans and fancy stuff, there used to be a running joke about it in Miami. A Cuban guy goes into a bar and orders Chivas and Coke. Actually, that’s most of the joke.

Now that I think about it, it seems like most cuisines lack a high end.

France has…French food. Their middle-tier food is on our high end.

America has fine steaks and lobster.

Japan has extreme sushi and wagyu.

That’s about all I can think of.

But a lot of countries have good middle-class food, and Cuba doesn’t. It’s all peasant food. The recipes are all written like they’re trying to save money. “Braise a leathery piece of eye round.” “Boil a piece of flank steak.” “Hammer a cheap piece of sirloin until it’s edible.”

Pork shoulder is about as cheap as meat gets.

Its weird how things work out. For example, there are great Scotches and some excellent bourbons, but there is no really good Irish whiskey. I would know if there were. I like Black Bush, which is just Bushmill’s that has been aged a little, but you can’t set it on a bar next to Pinch or Lagavulin. Aged Irish whiskey is smooth and pleasant, but it has zero complexity.

I don’t think there is any such thing as a really good rum or tequila. I used to drink 5-star Barbancourt, which is about as good as rum gets, and you couldn’t compare it to a good Cognac. I’m pretty sure all tequila is paint thinner.

There are truly great beers, and I know, because I make a couple of them right here. No great rums or tequilas, though, as far as I know.

Bacardi was Cuba’s best, but I think of it as a flavoring agent for Saturday-night vomit, or a good fuel for setting your beard on fire like Dan Haggerty. None of it is good. I would as soon drink Everclear as Bacardi 151.

If you want a good cheap rum, try Flor de Cana, from Nicaragua. Very smooth, inoffensive, and not expensive. The Jim Beam of rums.

Whatever you do, avoid Myers’s dark rum, from Jamaica. Jamaicans I knew told me they don’t drink it. It’s poison for tourists. It’s the only thing I’ve ever drunk that made me throw up the next day. They should call it Old Dry Heaves.

I don’t know of any other liquor that causes dry heaves.

Before I became the fine, flawless Christian I now am, I drank myself sick a number of times. Normal booze makes you feed the bushes a couple of times the same day you drink it. Myers’s dark rum will make you wish you were dead a day later, for hours and hours. And you don’t have to get drunk to get sick on it. It nearly killed me after a few Mai Tais.

I knew a couple of Bacardis. One, for some reason, was a Bermudan, but he hung around Miami. Very nice guy. Came close to marrying a friend of mine, also Cuban but not Bermudan. It didn’t work out. He was very pleasant, and he was loaded, so he satisfied one of my friend’s family’s hard requirements–the main requirement, really–but they felt he was lacking upstairs. They weren’t all geniuses, themselves, but anyway, that was their complaint.

Another Bacardi I knew went to private school in Massachusetts and learned to play hockey. He was a Bosch. There were some Bosches related to the Bacardis by marriage back in Cuba, and one of them did big things for the company.

He enrolled at my prep school and joined the ice skating club, and he zipped up and down the ice on his own sharp hockey skates, while we, a bunch of warm-weather Miami kids, slid around injuring ourselves on dull rentals. He thought very highly of himself, but my French teacher, who ran the club and mentored me through high school, thought he was an oaf.

The guy who did most of the work on my dad’s fishing yacht also worked on the Bacardi family’s boats, which were in the same marina. His name was Juan. Sometimes we couldn’t get him. He would tell us by phone that the Bacardis had flown him to the Bahamas for this or that problem.

Juan said the old Bacardis were pretty crude, but I won’t go into detail. “Old school Cubans,” I think he said. And he was Cuban, himself.

Juan could be critical of other Cubans. Bertram was the big Miami yacht builder, but Juan didn’t like working on their boats. He thought they were second-tier. He said, “built BY Cubans FOR Cubans.” He liked Hatteras yachts, built in North Carolina. My dad had a Hatteras. They really were better.

I don’t recall what kind of boats the Bacardis had. Probably Hatteras or some kind of custom jobs.

I knew a Bertram, too, now that I think about it. He went to my school. We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was.

His parents got so tired of him playing Devo albums, they removed the disks and would only let him sit and look at the covers. In his senior photo, he posed by a sign on Devon Road with his hand over the “N.”

Wow, it looks like he became a “reiki healer.” It’s on the web. That is really too bad. Someone to pray for.

Wikipedia says his dad had 10 kids, so maybe he has had to fend for himself.

Based on what other students said about him, he seemed to be abandond. At my school, we had a lot of abandoned kids. Their dads gave their lives to Mammon and became rich. Their mothers were depressing socialites with nothing ostensible to live for. They gave their children everything except God and themselves. The kids took drugs.

I guess I have digressed enough. Enjoy the pork.